Just - just hold on a second. This is big: NVIDIA, maker of graphics accelerator chips, has just announced, during its keynote at CES, that it is developing a high-performance ARM-based processor together with ARM, targeted squarely at the desktop, server, and even high-performance computing markets. That Windows on ARM thing? NVIDIA referenced it multiple times! Update: Boom, and we have a press release. "NVIDIA announced today that it plans to build high-performance ARM based CPU cores, designed to support future products ranging from personal computers and servers to workstations and supercomputers. Known under the internal codename 'Project Denver', this initiative features an NVIDIA CPU running the ARM instruction set, which will be fully integrated on the same chip as the NVIDIA GPU."

If true, this has nothing at all to do with either C++ or games, it is a completely separate issue.

Not so.

Insofar as this issue itself goes ... I thought that the general rule on Windows was not to dynamically link libraries. That is to say, it wasn't advisable on Windows to simply expect another library of the correct version to already be installed on a system, so that one can link to it, but rather one included any required libraries within one's own application code (that is, typically all required libraries are statically linked for every application).

This is to rather completely miss the point of what I was saying. The issue is not what libraries are available to be installed with the application when it's deployed; that's a secondary concern. The real issue arises when there's a chance that needed libraries won't be available even to the developer because the producer of a library hasn't made them available for ARM.

I understand that everyone likes the idea of portable code as an ideal. Unfortunately, things don't work like that in practice when you're dealing with C++. Even something like Boost, a wonderful and almost entirely header-only library, has significant components that need to be built explicitly before use.